The radar site was deep in enemy territory. The assumption was
that it was impossible for attackers to climb the sheer face of the
mountain.

The Fall of Lima Site 85

By John T. Correll

Lima Site 85 and the
secret Air Force radar facility sat atop one of the highest mountains
in Laos, 15 miles away from the border with North Vietnam. The site
was defended by a force of 1,000 Hmong irregulars in the valley
below, but a key element in its security was the mountain itself.

The drop on three sides
was nearly vertical, and US officials did not believe the enemy could
climb the cliffs. The fourth side of the mountain was fortified.

The assumptions were
wrong. On the night of March 10-11, 1968, under cover of a massive
artillery and infantry assault on the mountain, a team of North
Vietnamese sappers scaled the cliffs, overran the radar site, and
killed more than half of the Americans they found there.

For years thereafter,
the fate of Lima Site 85 was classified as top secret. When reports
finally began to emerge, they were riddled with gaps and
inaccuracies. Even now, almost 40 years after the attack, questions
and doubts persist about what happened that night on the mountaintop.

The story of Lima Site
85 began with the weather.

With the onset of the
northeast monsoon in October, the weather over North Vietnam turned
unfavorable for air operations and it did not improve again until
April. This was a big problem for Rolling Thunder, the air campaign
against North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968.

At the time, the US had
two all-weather strike aircraft: the Navy’s A-6 and the Air
Force’s B-52. Only a limited number of A-6s were available, and
for reasons of political reluctance in Washington, the B-52s were
held to bombing near the Demilitarized Zone. That left it up to
F-105s and other tactical aircraft to carry the war to the north, and
during the monsoon, they could strike targets around Hanoi for only
four or five days a month.

A solution of sorts
appeared in 1966 with an adaptation of Strategic Air Command’s
radar bomb scoring system. This modification, called the MSQ-77,
guided aircraft to a precise point in the sky where ordnance was
released. It wasn’t pinpoint accuracy, but it was good enough
for targets such as airfields and industrial areas.

By 1967, the Air Force
had five MSQ-77 radars working in South Vietnam and one in Thailand.
However, none of these sites covered the North Vietnamese heartland
around Hanoi. That required putting the radar where it would have an
unobstructed line of sight to the airspace over Hanoi. Also, the
target area had to be within 175 miles of the radar, which was the
effective range of the system.

Such a place existed at
Phou Pha Thi, a mountain in Laos 160 miles west of Hanoi. The Air
Force already had a TACAN navigational beacon in operation on the rim
of the mountain at an elevation of 5,580 feet. That was high enough
to give the radar a straight shot to Hanoi.

There was also a rough
landing strip, Lima Site 85, on the flank of the mountain. It was one
of several hundred such Lima sites built all over Laos by the CIA’s
proprietary airline, Air America, to supply Hmong hill tribesmen
fighting the Communist Pathet Lao. By strict definition, the Lima
site was the airstrip, but the area around the TACAN was generally
referred to as Lima Site 85 as well.

A portable version of
the MSQ-77 radar, the TSQ-81, could be broken down into sections and
transported to Phou Pha Thi by helicopter.

In
Hostile TerritoryThere were several problems with Lima
Site 85 as a location for a radar bombing system.

According to a 1962
Geneva agreement, which the United States had signed, Laos was a
neutral country. No foreign troops were supposed to be there. The US
promptly withdrew its forces in 1962, but only about 40 of the 7,000
North Vietnamese troops in Laos ever went home. Rather than confront
the North Vietnamese in Laos openly, the United States chose instead
to give covert assistance to the Royal Laotian government. (See “The
Plain of Jars,” June 1999, p. 78.)

As the conflict
gathered momentum, the CIA and Air America supplied and trained the
Hmong hill tribesmen, who were the best fighters in the Laotian Army.
The war in Vietnam spilled over into Laos as well. By 1965, US
aircraft were flying regular combat missions against targets in Laos.
In the north, Operation Barrel Roll supported the government troops
fighting the Pathet Lao, and in the south, Operation Steel Tiger
interdicted the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Laotian panhandle.

It was a secret war in
the sense that the American public was not told about it, although
Congress and the news media knew generally what was going on.

Lima Site 85 was
situated in the part of Laos where the enemy was strongest. The
mountain was 15 miles from the North Vietnamese border and less than
30 miles from the Pathet Lao capital of Sam Neua.

William H. Sullivan,
the US ambassador to Laos, was wary of installing a bombing radar in
Laos, and he was adamantly opposed to bringing in US combat troops to
defend the site. If there were to be a TSQ-81 system at Phou Pha Thi,
the defenders would have to be Hmong, trained and organized by the
CIA (which was known in Laos as CAS, or Controlled American Source).
For further defense, US air strikes could be used against any forces
that threatened the site.

If worse came to worst,
air rescue could bring the people out. The assumption was that there
would be plenty of time for helicopters to land at the helipad, 300
yards down the ridge from the radar site, and extricate the
technicians.

Sheep
DippedAt the urging of the Air Force and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, the United States took steps in 1967 to establish a
TSQ-81 facility at Phou Pha Thi. Sullivan obtained concurrence—with
conditions—from Souvanna Phouma, the Prime Minister of Laos.

“If the unit were
to be installed, Souvanna suggested that it must be done without his
knowledge,” Sullivan notified Washington in June. “Technicians
servicing the site would have to be civilians or military personnel
with civilian documentation.”

In July, Souvanna
agreed to the proposal. Sullivan reported, “I assured him that:
a) All USAF markings would be removed from equipment, b) Detonators
would be affixed to permit immediate destruction in case of imminent
danger, [and] c) Personnel would be under civilian cover.”

The Air Force rejected
the idea of sending airmen into Laos with fraudulent ID. If they were
captured in “shallow cover,” pretending to be civilians,
they would have no protection under the Geneva Convention as
prisoners of war.

Instead, volunteers
would go through a process known in the shadowy world of special
operations as “sheep dipping.” They would leave the Air
Force, be hired by a legitimate civilian company, and go into Laos as
employees. When their mission was over, they would be welcomed back
into the Air Force. If they were captured or killed, their families
would be covered by company or Air Force benefits.

Lt. Col. Gerald H.
Clayton, who had extensive experience with MSQ-77 radars, would head
the team. He and Lt. Col. Clarence F. “Bill” Blanton
handpicked the airmen who would be asked to volunteer. They had known
most of them for years.

The proposition was put
to the selected candidates at Barksdale AFB, La., in September 1967.
Forty-eight of them—four officers and 44 enlisted
members—volunteered for the program, which was named Heavy
Green. They were separated from the Air Force and employed by
Lockheed Aircraft Service Corp., a subsidiary of Lockheed Aircraft
Corp. While they were in the program, they would be paid by Lockheed,
which also gave each of them a substantial life insurance policy.

Their wives were
brought to Washington, briefed, and required to sign security
agreements to keep the program secret. SSgt. Herbert A. Kirk’s
wife, a German national, could not be granted security clearance and
she did not attend.

Additional space was
cleared atop Phou Pha Thi to make room for the radar installation,
and an Army CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopter brought in the larger
pieces of Heavy Green equipment. The expanded TSQ-81/TACAN area
reached about 150 feet inward from the southwest rim. Beyond that
point, the mountain rose in a tangle of rocky outcroppings and scrub
brush to a peak 1.6 miles to the north.

The radar was rigged
with explosives so it could be destroyed before the enemy could
capture it. Heavy Green took over the TACAN as an additional duty.
The radar bombing system went operational on Nov. 1, 1967.

Targeting
the NorthThe Heavy Green team deployed to Udorn Royal
Thai Air Base in northern Thailand and set up shop in two quonset
huts in the Air America compound. The sheep-dipped airmen lived in
rented housing off base. Around Udorn, they wore uniforms and carried
military ID. Ironically, this was a cover role, since they were, in
fact, civilians, having separated from the force.

When they flew to Lima
Site 85 for two-week rotational tours of duty, they wore civilian
clothes and carried their Lockheed ID.

Clayton was commander
of Det. 1 of the 1043rd Radar Evaluation Squadron, which had
headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. He also
was manager of the Lockheed field service group at Udorn.

The clandestine nature
of the site led to fuzzy lines of control and responsibility. The Air
Force was the main user of Lima Site 85 services, and the daily
tasking for support of bombing missions came from 7th Air Force in
Saigon. However, Sullivan was the ultimate authority over US activity
in Laos and everybody knew it.

The Geneva agreement
prohibited a US military headquarters in Laos. Therefore, under a
“Country Team” policy, military affairs were directed by
the ambassador. Sullivan was vigorous in the exercise of his
authority, and the war in Laos was marked by a power struggle and
antagonism between Sullivan and the military. Various arms of the US
government had an interest in Project Heavy Green, but none of them
was exclusively in charge.

The Pathet Lao were
active in the vicinity of Phou Pha Thi and they regularly clashed
with the Hmong, who were trying to keep communist forces from using
the mountain valleys as a route into central Laos. Concern about the
vulnerability of Lima Site 85 was offset by its operational value to
the Air Force.

The site was guarded by
a force of about 1,000 indigenous troops, mostly Hmong but including
some Thais. Of these, 200 were in the immediate vicinity of the radar
site with the other 800 on the lower parts of the mountain. Two CIA
paramilitary officers were stationed at the CAS area, just south of
the helipad. The approaches to the radar site were strewn with mines
and concertina wire.

Nobody expected the
enemy to get that far. From the bottom of the mountain, rocky slopes
extended about halfway up at angles of 45 to 60 degrees. The rest of
the way to the top was much steeper, rising in places at 85 to 90
degrees.

In response to an
inquiry from 7th Air Force, the office of the air attache in
Vientiane reported that the approaches to the top of Phou Pha Thi
were “virtually a vertical climb and those avenues which can be
traversed are heavily mined.” Phou Pha Thi could be taken if
the enemy concentrated a large force—about four
battalions—charged in full strength, and was willing to accept
heavy losses, the attache office said.

The northeast monsoon
of 1967-68 was especially severe. For the 18 weeks the Lima Site 85
radar was in operation—that is, from Nov. 1, 1967, to March 10,
1968—the Air Force relied on it for 23 percent of the air
strikes in the northern part of North Vietnam. Operations conducted
under the direction of Site 85 were called Commando Club.

Bombed
by BiplanesThe first attempt to destroy the radar site
came from the air. About 1 p.m. on Jan. 12, two Russian-built An-2
Colt biplanes made three bombing passes against the summit of the
mountain.

The biplanes had a
World War I look to them, but they were really not that old. The An-2
first flew as a crop duster in 1947. Cruising speed was below 150
mph, which probably was an advantage in this case because the
biplanes were dropping improvised munitions through tubes in the
floor.

The “bombs”
were converted 120 mm mortar rounds that would arm in the slipstream
and detonate on impact. The brunt of the attack fell on the CAS area,
where shiny rooftops apparently drew the attention of the An-2
pilots. They did not target the TSQ-81 facilities until the final
pass, and the bombs they dropped there all missed. The attack killed
two Laotian civilians and two guerrillas, but it did no damage to the
radar site.

An Air America Bell 212
helicopter, the civilian version of the Huey, was on the helipad at
the time of the attack. The crew leaped aboard and gave chase. The
helicopter was faster than the biplanes. As it flew past the An-2s,
the flight mechanic blasted them with a submachine gun, firing out
the door and hitting both of them. One An-2 crashed and burned, and
the other crashed 16 miles to the northwest while trying to clear a
ridge. The rudder from one of the biplanes was recovered and taken to
the Air America base at Long Tieng for a souvenir.

The security challenges
increased. On the evening of Jan. 30, the enemy pounded the southern
end of the mountain with a 30-minute mortar attack. It did not amount
to much and was written off as a probing attack.

By the middle of
February, the enemy was on all sides of the mountain, about seven
miles away. On Feb. 18, the Hmong wiped out a small party of North
Vietnamese five miles southeast of the site. Among those killed was
an officer who carried a notebook with plans for a coming attack on
Phou Pha Thi. It said three North Vietnamese battalions and one
Pathet Lao battalion would take part. The notebook contained the word
“TACAN” in English and it had the exact location.

Lima Site 85 continued
to direct bombing in North Vietnam, but, by February, more than half
of the Commando Club strikes were flown against the enemy forces
surrounding the mountain itself.

In late February, the
CIA said that the security of Phou Pha Thi could not be predicted
beyond March 10, and Sullivan sent a message to the Air Force warning
that the site probably could not be held much longer.

The Air Force did not
want to pull out. “Due to the desirability of maintaining air
presence over [the North Vietnamese] during present inclement weather
period, Site 85 probably would not be evacuated until capture
appeared imminent,” 7th Air Force said in a March 5 message to
Pacific Air Forces officials. “The fact that complete security
could not be assured in the original plan is noted.”

Up to then, the Heavy
Green personnel at the mountain had not been armed. In March, the
embassy approved the issue of M-16 rifles, although the technicians
had not achieved proficiency with them before the big attack came.

On March 11—the
TSQ-81’s last day of operation—19 Americans were at Phou
Pha Thi. Sixteen of them were Heavy Green personnel. The radar
technicians were divided into two shifts, one led by Blanton (a
sheep-dipped lieutenant colonel and Clayton’s deputy) and the
other by Stanley J. Sliz (a sheep-dipped captain). Also at the site
were a combat controller who had been sent from Vientiane to direct
local air strikes and the two CIA paramilitary officers in their own
building near the helipad.The Sappers Attack

The force that hit Phou
Pha Thi on March 10 consisted of between five and seven battalions,
amounting to some 3,000 troops. Mortar, artillery, and rocket rounds
began falling about 6 p.m. The enemy was firing on the mountain from
the north and east.

The barrage stopped at
7:45 p.m., having inflicted some damage on the living quarters, the
TACAN antenna, and a defensive gun position. Fighting continued at
the lower elevations. Blanton’s team took the duty in the
TSQ-81 van, while Sliz’s team was sent to rest in preparation
for duty later. With their quarters vulnerable to shelling, Sliz and
his group decided to spend the night on one side of the mountain,
where they would be sheltered from the artillery that was firing from
the opposite direction.

They took their
sleeping bags, weapons, and survival radios with them, descending
about 20 feet over the side by means of a makeshift ladder fashioned
from a C-130 cargo net. That took them to a small cliff, partially
protected by a rocky overhang. The airmen often went there when off
duty because it was a change from the tight confines of the radar
site. There was nothing below except a straight drop to the valley
below.

Through the night, A-26
bombers and F-4 fighters struck the attackers repeatedly, guided by
Blanton’s radar team. Sullivan considered evacuating the site,
but the Air Force held to its position of evacuating only as a last
resort if the situation became untenable. At about 9:30 p.m.,
Sullivan decided that nine of the Americans would be brought out at
first light the next morning. That, as Sullivan said later, would be
“one day too long.”

Before midnight, 33
North Vietnamese sappers climbed the western side of the mountain, a
feat that US officials assumed was impossible. The sappers had
trained for months, practicing on karst peaks and the faces of rock
cliffs. They emerged on the top of the mountain at a point between
the radar buildings and a Thai guard post.

The sappers waited in
hiding until 3 a.m., then began moving toward the Heavy Green
facilities. They bumped unexpectedly into an enemy guard, who threw a
grenade. The sappers immediately opened fire on the radar buildings
with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and submachine guns. “The
Americans were taken by surprise,” the North Vietnamese report
said later.

Eventually, the North
Vietnamese discovered Sliz’s team on a rock overhang about 20
feet down from the top. The sappers shot down the side of the
mountain with automatic weapons and lobbed grenades over the slope.

Several of the
Americans on the ledge were killed outright. Sliz and John Daniel
were wounded. However, CMSgt. Richard L. Etchberger was unhurt and,
because of him, his wounded companions would live to be rescued.
Etchberger kept the sappers at bay with his M-16 rifle.

At least eight
Americans were still alive on the mountain. Etchberger, Sliz, and
Daniel were on the ledge. The TACAN technician, Jack Starling, was by
the TACAN, wounded and playing dead. Bill Husband was on top of the
mountain, just north of Starling. The combat controller, Sgt. Roger
Huffman, was near the helipad. The two CIA officers, Howard Freeman
and John Spence, were at the CAS area south of the helipad.

RescueAt
5:15 a.m., Sullivan decided the evacuation of all personnel would
begin in two hours, at 7:15 a.m. Incoming fire stopped just before 7
o’clock. Air America and Air Force rescue helicopters were
standing by, ready to go in, but they were drawing fire from the
summit.

Hard fighting continued
on the lower parts of the mountain. The senior CIA officer, Freeman,
and 10 Hmong soldiers went to TSQ/TACAN area to determine the
situation. Freeman got no response when he called out, but his party
exchanged fire with the North Vietnamese attackers. Freeman was shot
in the leg and several of the Hmong were killed. A flight of A-1E
Skyraiders made a strafing pass over the site to brush back the enemy
before the helicopters approached.

First in, at 7:35 a.m.,
was an Air America Huey from Long Tieng. Spotting the men on the
ledge, the pilot pulled close to the cliff and the flight engineer
brought the survivors up by cable. Husband ran to join them.

Etchberger helped
Daniel and Sliz, who were wounded, board, then he and Husband went up
the cable. Etchberger was no sooner inside the helicopter than ground
fire came up through the floor, mortally wounding him. He died
minutes later. (Etchberger was awarded the Air Force Cross,
posthumously. It was presented to his wife, Katherine J. Etchberger,
by Gen. John P. McConnell, the Air Force Chief of Staff, in a closed
ceremony in the Pentagon Jan. 15, 1969. Present, in addition to the
family, were Clayton and almost every senior officer on the Air
Staff.)

At 8:20 a.m., an Air
America helicopter took out Thai and Hmong wounded. Freeman went with
them. A USAF Jolly Green Giant brought out more Hmong wounded at 8:46
a.m. At 8:54 a.m., Air America picked up Spence and Huffman. Husband
told the rescuers that one more person, Starling, was probably still
alive at the site. A Jolly Green Giant went to get him and picked him
up at 9:46 a.m.

Of the 19 Americans on
the mountain, eight had been brought out. Of the remaining 11, the
first count was eight dead and three presumed dead, but that was
updated by the Vientiane embassy within 24 hours: “Latest
interrogation and discussion with survivors has led to a firm
conclusion that three previously carried as missing were indeed seen
dead by one or more survivors. Therefore, we are no longer carrying
any personnel missing, but consider all of those who were not, repeat
not, extracted, to be dead.”

In their report, which
surfaced years later, the North Vietnamese claimed to have killed 42
men at the site and wounded many others, “primarily Lao and
Thai soldiers.”

Fall
of Site 85The Hmong defenders around the site held the
trail to the summit as late as 7:30 a.m., but they were badly
outnumbered and the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao force was too
powerful. Phou Pha Thi soon fell to the enemy. In the furor of the
attack, nobody detonated the thermite with which the radar had been
rigged.

“Presuming those
who were not evacuated on the morning of 11 March were dead, a fairly
concentrated air effort was launched on that same day to destroy the
technical and personal equipment left behind on Site 85,” the
embassy in Vientiane reported.

Sullivan met with
Souvanna Phouma and told him that Site 85 had not been destroyed but
that Air Force napalm strikes were being delivered. “He urged
me to destroy as much evidence as we can rapidly,” Sullivan
said.

A message from the
embassy on March 16 said that the next of kin had been notified of
the “missing status” of the 11 airmen who were not
evacuated. The message said the Air Force wanted to delay for a
“reasonable period” or until confirmation of death before
officially going from “Missing in Action” to “Killed
in Action.” That change was made March 25, thereby authorizing
insurance payments to the families.

The Heavy Green
survivors were restored to membership in the Air Force. The families
of the 11 missing men received payments from the Lockheed insurance
policy, and, in 1969, all of them except Herbert Kirk were reinstated
in the Air Force. Kirk’s wife did not have security clearance
to be told about the classified project. Apparently, Kirk agreed
that, in the event of his death, the government would stay with his
cover story and not reinstate him in the Air Force. His family would
rely on the Lockheed survivor benefits instead. This arrangement
would be later overturned in court.

The North Vietnamese
and the Pathet Lao moved to consolidate their victory. By September,
they had more than 20 battalions in the Sam Neua area. Hmong Gen.
Vang Pao launched a major operation to retake the mountain in
December. His forces did recapture the landing strip, the helipad,
and the CIA area, but they were unable to take the mountaintop. They
fell back, and Phou Pha Thi was never recaptured.

There was no attempt to
install another TSQ-81 in Laos. On March 31, President Johnson
announced a partial halt of bombing of North Vietnam and made the
bombing halt complete on Nov. 1. There was no longer a need for a
radar to guide strikes in the north.

Questions
in the AftermathThe “Secret War” in Laos was
publicly disclosed in 1970, but the announcement revealed nothing
about Lima Site 85 and what had happened there. Up to then, the
families had not been told much of the story. In 1970, an Air Force
team, which included Clayton, visited the families and gave them more
of the details.

One of the widows, Ann
Holland, did not believe she was getting the full answers or the
straight answers about the fate of her husband, TSgt. Melvin A.
Holland. In 1975, she sued the Air Force and Lockheed for negligence.
She said the government had not candidly informed her of the facts of
his death. The suit lingered in the courts until 1979, when it was
dismissed.

According to Timothy N.
Castle, author of a deeply researched 1999 book, One Day Too Long:
Top Secret Site 85 and the Bombing of North Vietnam, Ann Holland’s
lawsuit alerted the Kirk family as to what had happened at Lima Site
85. Mrs. Kirk had never been informed of the operation because she
had no security clearance. The Kirk family filed a lawsuit of its
own. Not until then was Kirk’s membership in the Air Force
posthumously restored and full military survivor benefits given to
his family.

The 11 men not
recovered from Phou Pha Thi, including Kirk, were awarded the Bronze
Star posthumously in 1984.

The story came out in
bits and pieces. Among the earliest public revelations was an
official Air Force history of the war, published in 1977. It
described the fall of Lima Site 85, but described it as a navigation
facility, leaving out any reference to the TSQ-81 bombing mission. In
1978, Airpower in Three Wars, written by Gen. William W. Momyer,
former commander of 7th Air Force, described the mission and
operation of the site in some detail but did not mention its capture.

A 56-page official Air
Force history of the loss of the site, written for internal use and
classified Top Secret when it was completed in August 1968, was
declassified in its entirety in 1988. It adds substantial detail but
is marred by a number of factual errors. The history is now available
on the Internet.

The North Vietnamese
report—titled “Raid on the TACAN Site Atop Pha-Thi
Mountain by a Military Region Sapper Team on 11 March 1968”—was
published in 1996 and obtained and translated by the Department of
Defense in 1998.

Castle interviewed
dozens of survivors and former officials for his 1999 book. It filled
in numerous details and identified mistakes in earlier works.

In recent years, there
have been recurring reports that some of the technicians at Lima Site
85 were captured, not killed. A former high-ranking Pathet Lao
officer told Castle that prisoners were taken. He, however, had not
been present at Phou Pha Thi, and his statement was contradicted by
the statements of others, including former enemy soldiers who were
there. They said there had been no prisoners. The detailed North
Vietnamese account of the attack, published in 1996, did not report
any prisoners either.

The Department of
Defense credited the statement of the American survivors and other
evidence, including study of aerial photos of the site taken on March
11, and held to its assessment and carried the 11 airmen on its rolls
as “Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered.”

Return
to the MountainSince 1994, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting
Command, headquartered at Hickam AFB, Hawaii, has interviewed
witnesses and made trips to Laos and Vietnam, gathering information
about the fate of Americans at Phou Pha Thi. Among those interviewed
have been villagers who lived near the site and former enemy soldiers
who took part in the attack.

Excavations at Phou Pha
Thi in December 1994 and January 1995 produced no information about
American casualties. In March 2003, however, acting on information
from new witnesses, representatives of the command searched the
summit, the eastern and western slopes, the western cliffs, and the
slopes below.

Two former North
Vietnamese commandos who took part in the attack showed the
investigators three places where they had thrown bodies over the
cliff. The investigators threw mannequins over the edge at those
points while a photographer in a helicopter videotaped their fall.
That pointed the investigators to a ledge, 540 feet below.

Mountaineer-qualified
specialists scaled down cliffs to the ledge, where they discovered
human remains, leather boots in four different sizes, five survival
vests, and other fragments of material that indicated the presence of
at least four Americans. The team worked in hazardous conditions,
including strong winds and falling rocks, which constrained the
search.

In December 2005, the
Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office announced the
identification of the remains of TSgt. Patrick L. Shannon, one of the
11 airmen at Phou Pha Thi. Further excavation of the ledges is
planned, assuming the willingness of the Laotian government to
approve access to the site.

Today, commentaries on
the fall of Lima Site 85 appear with some regularity in newspapers
and military journals, but interpretations differ and the controversy
continues.

The losses at Phou Pha
Thi seem all the more tragic because, 20 days after the attack, the
White House put an end to Rolling Thunder operations above the 20th
parallel, of which the Lima Site 85 radar was a part, and the bombing
of Hanoi came to a halt. The courage and sacrifice of those who died
on the mountaintop stood in counterpoint to the strategic indecision
and changing political winds in Washington.

John
T. Correll was editor in chief of Air Force Magazine for 18 years and
is now a contributing editor. His most recent article, “Determination
of a Sandy,” appeared in
the March issue.